In USSRmany films have been dedicated to the years of revolution and civil war. Their study highlights the work of ideology and censorship, while raising the question of reception and “documentary truth”.
As the centenary of February and October 1917 approaches, historian Alexandre Sumpf offers a fascinating reflection on the cinematographic stories devoted to the years of revolution and civil war, the crucible of the Bolshevik “nation”. These formative years are celebrated through documentary and fiction, from 1917 and until the last years of the communist regime.
If the allusion to the film by the American director DW Griffith Birth of a Nation (1915), dedicated to the Civil War and fairly favorable to the Ku Klux Klan, is hardly convincing, the title has the merit of referring to the coherence of the Marxist-Leninist project implemented during seventy years: refounding, on the ruins of the Russian Empire, a socialist state and society, while placing it in a teleological history of which October is the tabula rasa, which does not exclude – of course – the regular rewriting and conflict of recent history.
A highly politicized genre
Alexandre Sumpf mobilizes his perfect knowledge of Soviet social and cultural history and draws on unpublished archives to offer a total history of all the films devoted to the Revolution. His book reveals a fascinating variety of productions, documentaries, educational, propaganda (agitka) and fiction, without limiting ourselves to great directors or emblematic films, the best known of which – but rarely seen – remains October by Eisenstein.
The picture painted in the first part allows us to discover the evolution of a young, highly politicized industry (certain directors like Vertov or Pudovkin having been actors in the revolution and the civil war) and progressively state-controlled, which is becoming a mass leisure activity. urban, but also rural, with the traveling cinema. As in the West, television competes with cinema, but allows the production of historical documentaries intended for a wide audience.
Every November 7, the Soviet regime reassured itself on the anniversary of the Revolution – known as the October Revolution according to the Julian calendar abandoned with the fall of the Tsar – and particularly celebrated the ten-year anniversaries: 1927 with Stalin’s control of power eliminating Trotsky , 1947 with the takeover by the ideologue Zhdanov, 1957 with de-Stalinization, 1967 with the re-prominence of the figure of Lenin, 1977 with the Brezhnev tension.
Censorship, ideology and political evolution ofUSSR obviously conditioned the treatment of the event by the filmmakers. So it was with the tastes of the leaders: Stalin watched the film thirty-eight times, between its release in 1934 and 1938. Chapaiev dedicated to a red political commissar killed during the civil war! Rasputin. The agony by Klimov took twelve years to reach Soviet screens (1973-1985), blocked by Brezhnev’s entourage who saw in it too many allusions to the decadence of the Soviet elites. The construction of theUSSR also became an issue: after 1945, films left the two capitals – Moscow and Petersburg, which became Leningrad – and offered a rereading of the civil war through the participation of nationalities, taking advantage of the decentralization of studios in Ukraine, Georgia or Central Asia. and thus legitimizing a neo-imperial narrative.
What “documentary truth”?
The political message was not, however, the only issue, and Alexandre Sumpf very well retraces the fierce debates which also focused on the notion of “documentary truth”. Which assembly to choose? Should we bet on the disappearance of the actor for the benefit of the crowds and anonymous heroes? What about the incarnation of the Bolshevik leaders by a whole series of doubles, from Lenin to Stalin via Dzerzhinsky, but without Trotsky, whose absence some dared to criticize in October of Eisenstein?
If the “historical-revolutionary” genre, a mixture of reconstructions and epic narration, dominates, other genres exist, inspired by musical comedy or using current images more pedagogically. In 1927, for The Fall of the House of Romanovdirector Esfir Choub does research at the Museum of the Revolution, finds private films of the Tsar, and even gets foreign newsreels purchased.
Alexandre Sumpf does not avoid the question of the reception of these films, difficult to understand for a country as immense and diverse as theUSSR. It is approached through the prism of print distribution data, which shows that these films have never been profitable, and surveys carried out among spectators for both political and economic reasons, where ideological questions logically take precedence over assessment of emotional reactions and aesthetic judgment.
Like the written records of spectators’ impressions, these unpublished sources remain very difficult to interpret in a Soviet context where the notion of public opinion is open to question. Finally, Soviet production is quickly compared with that of “white” émigrés in Paris, Berlin or Hollywood, who, with the notable exception of the “Rasputin fashion” of the interwar period, avoided the subject until ‘At Doctor Zhivago (1960). After 1945, the production of popular democracies placed emphasis on internationalism.
Celebrate the revolution
The second part of the work offers a detailed analysis of nineteen films, following a progression in large stages. The moment 1917 was marked by enormous losses, rushes preserved in fragments without a precise date, author or sponsor, the presence of the street, of the crowd, including in fiction, political effervescence, emergency filming , the first censorship also with the film For the power of the people dedicated to the first exercise of democratic voting and removed from the screens in 1918.
After 1927, it was a matter of remobilizing around an initial assessment, allowing those who experienced the “imperialist war” and the revolution as well as the youngest to recognize themselves. Alexandre Sumpf offers a detailed study ofOctober by Eisenstein, clearly showing the poor reception, at the time, of a complex film which paradoxically became iconic, to the point that its images were sometimes included as authentic in Western school textbooks.
Between 1927 and 1937, the focus loosened chronologically and spatially. We discuss Ukraine (with Dovjenko’s Arsenal and his denunciation of Ukrainian nationalism, which was an event in 1929), the countryside, the civil war. A remnant of the empire d’Ermler offers an original reflection on trauma and amputated memory, with the character of a red soldier struck by shell shock, who regains his memory ten years later.
1937 opens a period during which cinema turns to future conflicts, denounces “spies” and “traitors”. October nevertheless becomes an obligatory, but perilous, passage for the success of a career as a director. The Last Night by Iouli Raizman will thus be screened and awarded at the Paris International Exhibition, against German films, but criticized for not having sufficiently featured Stalin. After his death, the Second World War emerged as the new matrix experience uniting Soviet society. Productions become mediocre, unless they play with codes: animated films, games between reality and fiction in Rasputin. The agony by Elen Klimov, released the year Gorbachev came to power.
This will be the last film of a separate genre, studied for the first time in this beautiful book which manages, despite a rather poor iconography, to make you want to see these films and makes you regret that so much has been lost.